Continuous and discontinuous dark solitons in polariton condensates

Abstract

Bose-Einstein condensates of exciton-polaritons are described by a Schr\"odinger system of two equations. Nonlinearity due to exciton interactions gives rise to a frequency band of dark soliton solutions, which are found analytically for the lossless zero-velocity case. The soliton's far-field value varies from zero to infinity as the operating frequency varies across the band. For positive detuning (photon frequency higher than exciton frequency), the exciton wavefunction becomes discontinuous when the operating frequency exceeds the exciton frequency. This phenomenon lies outside the parameter regime of validity of the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) model. Within its regime of validity, we give a derivation of a single-mode GP model from the initial Schr\"odinger system and compare the continuous polariton solitons and GP solitons using the healing length notion.